Costa-Gavras’s New Corporate-Espionage Thriller, Capital, Is His Most Enticing in Years

Marc Tourneuil, the Machiavellian hero of Costa-Gavras’s new corporate thriller Capital, is a nondescript middle manager at the French megabank Phenix who dreams of something more. When his CEO collapses on the golf course one day, he is tapped to take the bank’s helm; the institution’s board sees only his loyalty and hopes to use him as a puppet. But, once imbued with power, Tourneuil (rising star Gad Elmaleh) starts exerting it aggressively. He demands a higher salary. He hires a private dick to tell him if his colleagues are conspiring. When his wife (Natacha Régnier)—who first knew him as a modest academic—frets about this new lifestyle, he bridles under his distaste.

“What do you want?” she asks.

“Money,” he says.

“More? Why?”

“To be respected.”

Rewards of this kind, of course, arrive with a cost. One of the bank’s shareholders, Dittmar Rigule (the Irish actor Gabriel Byrne), pressures the new CEO to join a lucrative but shady business venture based in Miami. (“We’re pack hunters, Marc,” Rigule says. “You’re most welcome to join the pack.”) Tourneuil does just that, but suspects that this lucrative under-the-table endeavor is part of a larger scheme. Meanwhile, his efforts at the bank grow mercenary. Compelled to fire huge numbers of people, he devises a “social program,” through which employees can file complaints about one another. He uses the feedback as a premise for extensive layoffs—a vicious culling that looks like a heroic championing of workers’ rights. (He stole the trick from Mao.) Meanwhile, having learned at the feet of the dollar-hungry Americans after spending five years at Goldman Sachs, he presses Phenix toward harder-nosed, more international maneuvers. When the private eye begins to uncover plans to depose him, he lays plots worthy of Shakespeare’s hunchbacked king. His private life becomes complex. An international supermodel called Nassim (played by the real-life L’Oréal model Liya Kebede) has taken a fickle liking to him, or at least to his expense account: Her personal finances are a mess of debt and reckless spending, and Tourneuil finds himself picking up her increasingly huge tabs in pursuit of capricious clubbing dates and vague promises of intimacy. His marriage grows strained, and a noose of corporate espionage begins to tighten around his tailored shoulders.

Costa-Gavras is now 80 years old with a lifetime of ambitious filmmaking behind him. In his best-known movies—the 1969 thriller Z, which presented a fresh and sardonic portrait of Greek politics, and the 1982 film Missing, about the disappearance of an American journalist following the 1973 Chilean coup—he defined himself as a frank but engaging chronicler of true-to-life political conspiracy, an explorer of the uses and abuses of systemic power. Capital is, brilliantly, cast in this mold, but, unlike many of Costa-Gavras’s other films, it fixes our attention not to the systemic victim but to its victor. The power-hungry, ruthless Tourneuil is a monster viewers find themselves at once loathing and cheering on—proof of how seductive the high-stakes game of financial conquest can be to those who have a chance at victory.

To contemporary viewers, in fact, Capital is plainly, if inexplicitly, a rhapsody on the perils of Sarkozy’s vision of France. The obsession with aggressive deal-making, the avidity for American-style finance and all that it entails, the interest in wealth above all things—these are among the chilly winds of change that the 23rd French president brought into office and left swirling in his wake. Elmaleh is expert at embodying them (his corporate deadpan seems to reflect both a Gallic cool and a stateside heartlessness), and Costa-Gavras, far from being a fuddy-duddy in old age, has produced one of his fastest and most engaging thrillers yet. Based on a novel by Stéphane Osmont,Capital is a classic espionage tale that doubles as a cultural indictment befitting this moment in international life. To want to rule the markets is to be governed by them, it suggests. And the more the will to wealth and power grows, the harder it becomes to seek escape.